Rewilding as Spiritual Discipline
Start Date
August 2024
End Date
August 2024
Location
ALT 205
Abstract
This project explores the rewilding of domesticated lawn spaces as a spiritual discipline and resistant response amid the Anthropocene. While other forms of climate and conservation efforts take a strictly scientific approach, rewilding prioritizes a relation-based response that is attentive to land history and the grief of lost places. Similar to other spiritual practices such as regular prayer or meditation, rewilding is a prolonged spiritual discipline through which the practitioner seeks to become more fully aware of a truer nature of the world and one’s place within it. Because of the literal posture needed to engage in this work, one is made more clearly and sensuously aware of the tissues and systems of reciprocity that connect us to soil, light, water, oxygen, and bees of the places we inhabit — and begins to more radically expand one’s boundaries compassion to include the nonhuman because of this awareness.
This project breaks down how the history and theologies of masculinist mono-crop land management have led us to our current climate crisis as well as a fundamental breakage of human-to-earth relationship. Rewilding is a study in resistance to this dominant Western conceptualization of land that prioritizes efficiency over maintenance and consumerism over relationship and suggests a new theology of land relations that remains attentive to the places we inhabit.
Keywords: rewilding, Anthropocene, spirituality, resistance, land, reciprocity, relationship
Rewilding as Spiritual Discipline
ALT 205
This project explores the rewilding of domesticated lawn spaces as a spiritual discipline and resistant response amid the Anthropocene. While other forms of climate and conservation efforts take a strictly scientific approach, rewilding prioritizes a relation-based response that is attentive to land history and the grief of lost places. Similar to other spiritual practices such as regular prayer or meditation, rewilding is a prolonged spiritual discipline through which the practitioner seeks to become more fully aware of a truer nature of the world and one’s place within it. Because of the literal posture needed to engage in this work, one is made more clearly and sensuously aware of the tissues and systems of reciprocity that connect us to soil, light, water, oxygen, and bees of the places we inhabit — and begins to more radically expand one’s boundaries compassion to include the nonhuman because of this awareness.
This project breaks down how the history and theologies of masculinist mono-crop land management have led us to our current climate crisis as well as a fundamental breakage of human-to-earth relationship. Rewilding is a study in resistance to this dominant Western conceptualization of land that prioritizes efficiency over maintenance and consumerism over relationship and suggests a new theology of land relations that remains attentive to the places we inhabit.
Keywords: rewilding, Anthropocene, spirituality, resistance, land, reciprocity, relationship
